Case study: a county government’s 774 PDFs, through Proof in about two hours

Picture the ADA coordinator at a county government serving more than 100,000 people. The Justice Department's ADA Title II rule covers the county's website and every document posted on it. That website holds permit forms, planning notices, transit schedules, budgets, election guides and public health flyers, and nobody knows what shape they are in.

How big was the library?

Proof crawled the county's website in under an hour and a half and found 906 PDFs. 774 of them, 12,594 pages in all, became the library for this study: forms and applications, agreements and resolutions, plans and studies, planning notices, building codes, transit schedules, public health materials and election guides. They average 16.3 pages, and 35 run past 100. If nobody has counted the PDFs on your own site, that is the step that comes first.

What shape was it in?

The county had already done some of this work by hand. 32 of the 774 documents met WCAG 2.1 AA (4%), and Proof certified them in its first analysis. Between them, the library's documents failed 3,204 accessibility checks, and 250 (32%) could not be read by any checker at all: 192 had never been tagged and 58 were scans with no text layer. 97 of the files carry "ADA" or "WCAG" in their names; 12 of those 97 passed. The first analysis of the whole library took 26 minutes.

What did Proof do in about two hours?

The coordinator chose the whole library, kept the recommended settings, and pressed one button: "Remediate 737 documents". Machine fixes apply on their own, anything an AI writes waits for a person, and documents Proof finishes completely are certified under the county's standing instruction. Two hours later, 705 of the 737 documents were done. By the end of the run, Proof had:

• made 246 of the 250 unreadable documents readable, tagging 189 and adding a text layer to 57;
• fixed 2,361 of the library's 3,204 failed checks (74%);
• certified 57 more documents outright, 89 in all, each with a public verification page that says no person approved it;
• drafted 6,894 image descriptions across 412 documents, for a person to accept or edit.

No one touched a file. The last 32 documents, long ones with a median of 180 pages, finished over the next five hours.

What was left for a person to do?

When the run finished, the coordinator was not facing 774 files to rebuild. They had a review queue, sorted by the decisions only a person can make, with the work already drafted:

That is about 11 minutes for each document that ends up certified, or about three weeks for a single reviewer. Image descriptions are where the time goes: 412 documents carry drafts to check, and the most image-heavy carry up to 180 each. We estimated these times from 5,236 timed review actions by remediators and public-agency staff working in Proof on 635 public-sector documents, applied to this library's own queue.

How many documents end up certified?

Working that queue certifies 622 of the 774 documents (80%) to WCAG 2.1 AA, up from 32. Where a review turns up a real problem, that document goes to repair instead of sign-off.

The other 152 need a repair before they can certify: most often a list or a table to tag, content the tagging missed, or a reading order to rebuild. Proof names each of those documents and the repair it needs. Your team makes those repairs in Proof, or Ockem's experts take them on Assured, quoted per document, with the same certificate at the end.

What would this library cost?

Ockem charges one flat price per document, charged only when the document certifies. At the pack rates for a library this size, $15 to $22 per document, the 622 documents that certify come to roughly $9,300 to $13,700 before long files are counted. A file over 50 pages counts as one document per 50 pages, and 35 files here run past 100, so the true figure is higher; the pricing page's estimator does the sum for your own count. Most documents need one manual check from your team, two at the 90th percentile; in this library that review is the 118 hours above.

A remediation service that rebuilds files one at a time is commonly quoted at $3–10+ per page: $38,000 to $126,000 for the same 12,594 pages, with the review done for you. A checker costs little and fixes nothing.

How does this compare with a checker or a service?

A checker reports on every file and stops. A file name that says "ADA" is not a test either: 97 files here carry "ADA" or "WCAG" in their names, and 12 of them passed. A remediation service rebuilds files one at a time and takes weeks. Proof did the rebuilding across nearly the whole library in about two hours, and what it handed a person was a short, specific decision on each document.

What does the certificate say?

Each one names what the machine checked, what a person attested and what was not tested, and links to a public page anyone can use to verify it. A certificate Proof issues on its own says exactly that: no person approved it. What the certificate claims, and what it does not.

How we did this study

We pointed Proof's crawler at the county's public website and imported the 774 PDFs that became the library, then ran one remediation with the recommended settings. The county did not take part and we do not name it. The 32 documents that already met WCAG 2.1 AA were certified in the first analysis, before the run. The counts of documents, pages, checks and fixes are Proof's own measurements, read after the run settled. The review hours and the certified count after review are estimates, from timed review work in Proof on other public-sector documents, applied to this library's queue. Prices are Ockem's list prices as of October 2026; the per-page range comes from vendor quotes we reviewed in August 2026. This study was written by Ockem, which makes Proof.

If you are that coordinator, start where this study started: count your PDFs, free.

Questions

This study reports Ockem’s own measurements and estimates. It isn’t legal advice.